DeployPHP Series, Part 2: Bringing Data Security to PHP Applications

Overview

Using PHP to build a Web-based, database-driven application is an increasingly popular way to give trusted users easy access to corporate data. However, the PHP developers must acknowledge that linking sensitive and often mission critical data to an application accessible outside the corporate network is a serious security risk. At Department of Alumni Relations of McGill University, the author has chosen to combine Oracle's industrial-strength security with PHP's ease of development to ensure data availability without incurring the risk of compromising the security of the entire database. This paper highlights the major steps in building and deploying such a solution and walk through the code of a sample application.